As you can imagine, most of our clients do not engage us if their processes or their customer experience is stellar. For these situations, process and customer experience remediation and triage is essential and we need to make critical changes fast. In other cases, we have clients that have keen foresight to anticipate future problems or they have objectivity to recognize that their company has a situation that needs to be addressed now. Great leaders do this, even if it means acknowledging, under their leadership, that there are opportunities for improvement. This takes they kind of boldness that great leaders exemplify.
I recently read this article regarding a process disaster involving Costco and their recent switch away from American Express, to CitiBank Visa (see link below).
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/22/news/companies/costco-citibank-visa-american-express/index.html
In a nutshell, Costco rolled out a credit card change that should be more beneficial to its customers. The rollout got botched and this resulted in customers that go into a store or go online, load up their shopping cart, wait in line and then are denied purchase at the register if they don’t have a Visa card. Then, to add insult to injury, more labor by the store is needed to restock all of the items that were in their cart.
How about that as a great example of a bad customer experience? This certainly has Sam’s Club ready to pounce – Sam’s now offering free access to Costco members.
Not all disasters can be predicted, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out. This self-inflicted change has created a gaping hole for its primary competitor and could have been prevented with more thoughtful process and organization design and proactive process simulation.
Operationally, consider asking yourself and your organization the following:
- When was the last time we took a hard look at what our clients/customers have to go through to do business with us?
- How easy or hard is it?
- What have we done to differentiate ourselves, not by our products or services, but how we onboard a client, deliver our products/services and administer them?
- What have we done lately to create an unfair advantage for ourselves in this area?
Whether they are big or small challenges, these are exactly the types of issues that TSI helps our clients avoid. This is what we process geeks get excited about sinking our teeth into. Please reach out to us and let us know how we can assist you or your business.
– written by: Dan Feely, TSI’s President and Founder – Visit The TSI Team page for more information on Dan and his talented team.
